Month: June 2015

It is the small stuff, the jolly you-must-be-kidding non-events in life that sometimes throw you for a loop. Earlier this week, we found out that our kids will come and visit us in Saintes, France over Christmas and New Years – now, that’s big! That’s a mega-event of delightful proportions, an occasion that puts a […]

[continued from “Walking About – Part Two] I never realized how much I click the shutter release until I started this third part of my little twenty-minute walk home from physical therapy and saw, how many pictures I had accumulated … Anyway, after our encounter with the deer late in the last walkabout post, we’re […]

[continued from previous post “Walking About”] This timeworn front door caught my fancy as I turned from Rue Saint-Saloine into Rue Saint-Vivien. It’s not ancient, maybe from the 1940th, and it hasn’t been well maintained, but I think it shows that the original owner gave some extra effort to beautify his or her home. I felt […]

My new Frenchy family doctor prescribed physiotherapy for me to try to get a handle on my persistent back and leg pain. A physical therapist is called a kinésithérapeute in French, quite the tongue twister! Mine is located in the quartier Saint-Vivien, the neighborhood around the church of Saint-Vivien. This is also the neighborhood which […]

Saturday evening we dined al fresco on the veranda, watching life play out in front of us on Quai de la République, the river Charente and Place Bassompierre on the opposite bank. It wasn’t the brightest of summer evenings, but still comfortable and very pleasant in an overcasty way. That was no longer the case […]

In large part thanks to the aid of automated translators, I routinely write emails or post on Facebook in either English, German, French or Spanish, with a smidgen Italian thrown in now and then. I’m only fluent in two of those languages, happily guessing my way through the others, killing grammar right and left as […]